There is a category of thing in life that you cannot cheat at, and I’ve come to think those are the ones worth paying attention to.
Not everything needs this treatment, to be clear. Plenty of life can and should be cheated at, or skipped, or done at seventy percent. I am not here to tell you to wring optimization out of every waking hour, and I’d gently back away from anyone who is. But there’s a particular kind of cheating our whole era is organized around: optimizing the proxy until it comes loose from the thing it was supposed to measure. The credential without the competence. The follower count without the audience. The performance of a life rather than the living of one. We’ve gotten extraordinarily good at this. Most of what gets rewarded now is the proxy, and the gap between the proxy and the real thing has become a place you can build an entire identity inside.
There’s something in my life that brutally strips this option away, and that’s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ).
The first thing it asks of you is the most boring thing imaginable: show up. Not once, in a burst of enthusiasm, but again and again, including the nights you don’t want to, when nothing visible is happening and you’re sore and somehow slightly worse than you were last week. There’s no version of progress that skips this part. You can’t read your way to a better guard, can’t watch enough video, can’t buy the right gi. You can only accumulate time on the mat, and time refuses to be rushed. Belts are supposed to mark that accumulation, and roughly they do. But every honest practitioner knows the belt is a receipt, not the thing itself. It’s a proxy. And the quiet grace of the sport is that the proxy gets exposed as one the instant you start to roll: your actual skill announces itself in the first thirty seconds, before either of you has said a word, and no stripe of colored fabric can argue with what your body does or fails to do.
None of this requires being a maniac about it. The work is patient, not punishing, closer to tending something than to conquering it. The fourteen-hour cook can’t be hurried any more than the fire can be reasoned with; some things just keep their own time, and your impatience isn’t an input they accept. You show up, you put in the hours that are yours to put in, and then you let it cook.
What it reveals
You will be defeated, constantly, by people you did not expect to lose to. Someone smaller. Someone newer. Someone older and calmer who never appears to be trying very hard. They will fold you up with an ease that is, the first few times, genuinely disorienting, because most of adult life is arranged so that you never have to find out exactly where you stand. We accumulate titles and salaries and soft social deference, and we mistake all of it for a measure of ourselves. The mat strips that away in about four seconds.
And you can’t argue with it. There’s no committee to appeal to, no story you can tell afterward that changes what happened. You tapped. The tap is not a metaphor for humility. It is humility, administered to you involuntarily, on a schedule you do not control. You can integrate what it shows you or you can lie to yourself about it, and the second option simply means it will happen again next week, and the week after, until you stop.
This kind of honesty is a muscle, and it generalizes. Once you’ve practiced being shown something true about yourself and not flinching away from it, you start to notice all the smaller places you’d been managing the story instead of looking at it. The flinch, the little reflex that cuts off an uncomfortable truth before you’ve fully seen it, gets quieter. Not gone. Quieter.
Who it requires
It would be easy to read all of this as a story about individual grit, the lone practitioner forging himself against resistance. It isn’t. It can’t be. You physically cannot do this alone. There is no shadow-boxing your way to a better guard. The entire enterprise depends on other people showing up to be your problem to solve, and on your being theirs.
Which means the people who defeat you are not your opponents in any meaningful sense. They’re the reason any of it works. The care of the ones who humble you is what keeps you coming back. When you get tapped, more often than not the person who just defeated you will immediately show you the way out of it: how to defend it, how to see it coming, how to not be there next time. They beat you and then they hand you the answer. The defeat and the generosity arrive in the same motion, from the same person, and after a while you stop experiencing them as two separate things.
No proxy can fake that, and it’s what keeps a room full of people coming back to get beaten up on purpose. Not the grit. The community. You can’t cheat your way into people who care enough to humble you honestly and then pick you back up.
What it makes you
So you collect belts, eventually, if you stay long enough. And they’re nice. But the belt was never the point, and everyone serious knows it. The belt is just the most legible part, the part the outside world can read. The thing that actually accrued is somewhere you can’t show anyone: it’s in your hands when you roll, in the calm that arrives where panic used to be, in the version of you that’s been shown the truth a thousand times and learned to stay in the room for it.
This is what the un-cheatable things have in common, I think. They’re the ones that compound into a self. Everything you cheat at, you have to keep cheating at forever, because there’s nothing underneath. The proxy needs constant maintenance precisely because it isn’t attached to anything real. But the things you can’t cheat at run the other way. You can’t fake them, which means once they’re yours, they’re yours, load-bearing, permanent in a way that titles and follower counts and curated lives never quite manage to be. You become the person who did the reps. Everything else is borrowed.
I’ve spent two other essays circling this same thing from a different side. In The Emotional Man I wrote about the armor, the performance of not needing, and how long I wore it before I could even see it. In The Paradox of Asking for Desire I tried to name why the performance fails even when it works: you can drive a relationship at the wrong frequency with enormous effort, and the response stays small and dies the moment you stop pushing. That’s the same physics as cheating. Anything you have to keep performing was never load-bearing, because there was nothing real underneath it to bear the load.
My emotions are like the mat. So are my relationships, and the place where the two meet. You can’t fake what you actually feel. You can’t shortcut the work of staying honest with the people you love, of sitting in something shapeless without rushing to fix it, of being humbled and coming back anyway because the people doing the humbling are the ones who care enough to do it honestly. I’ve gotten more attached to all of it lately, not less. The feeling, the people, the way they intertwine. It turns out the things I once treated as liabilities to manage are the load-bearing ones. They were always going to be the things I couldn’t cheat.
The things you can’t cheat at are inconvenient, and slow, and they will defeat you in front of witnesses. Pay attention to them anyway. They’re the only ones that were ever going to keep.
Keep showing up to the things you can’t cheat at. And keep the people who help you through them.